"People Give and Take a Lot to Participate." Youth Talk Back: A Case for Nonparticipation

• In Event: AERA Poster Session 8
  In Poster Session: Critical Educators for Social Justice Poster Session

Abstract

Scholars have critiqued participation typologies for ignoring contextual specificities and complexities, nuances, and power dynamics inherent in participatory processes. Drawing on young people’s narratives and photographs from a photovoice project on youth engagement in the HIV sector, I provide a thematic analysis of how young people understood and navigated this ‘call to participation’ in complex, and self-determined ways. I put their narratives in dialogue with critical scholars’ writing on settler-colonialism, neoliberalism, and willfulness to tease apart how young people’s comments on non-participation offer a sophisticated counter-hegemonic understanding of this ‘call to participation’, and its discursive and material effects. I conclude by reflecting on how non-participation might be generatively read as acts of resistance that complicates and enriches participation frameworks.

Author

• Sarah Switzer, OISE/University of Toronto